You liberals are reading this all wrong. It clearly says 4.7% percent. As in, between 4 and 5%. Obviously, since you can only be Democrat or Republican, that mean Republicans make up a whopping 98% of the erectorate. Oh wait, the decimal place on my monitor crawled away. Bugs everywhere... damnit Obama... where are my pills?

I'm betting that GOP gerrymandering will actually hurt the GOP. It assures that the real battles are in the primaries. It makes it very difficult for the GOP to move away from the extreme right, should they choose to battle for the center (undecideds) again. Of course, they'll rarely win the white house until they do.

This makes me think of those other polls asking people to identify themselves as conservative or liberal that usually show most Americans self-identifying as conservatives. Conservatives and conservative pundits love to tout those polls results, but all it really means is that when it comes to self-identifying, the definition of 'conservative' differs wildly and that some people say they are conservative simply because they've been beaten over the head with the 'liberal = dirty stoner hippie' meme for the past 40 years.

Dear Jerk:I'm betting that GOP gerrymandering will actually hurt the GOP. It assures that the real battles are in the primaries. It makes it very difficult for the GOP to move away from the extreme right, should they choose to battle for the center (undecideds) again. Of course, they'll rarely win the white house until they do.

They have made life hard for Democrats until 2021. But at this pace, by the time 2020 comes around, admitting to being a Republican will have the same social effects as admitting to being a member of the KKK now.

Lumpmoose:Hasn't that been true forever? A big chunk of Republican voters are "independents" that always vote Republican. It's similar to why few Americans deign to call themselves "liberal" even when many are.

I know people far more liberal than I am (and I'm a registered Democrat and "pretty liberal" according to my wife) that still call themselves conservative leaning.

I'm not sure what to make of it. Has the right poisoned the term "liberal" to that extent?

meat0918:I'm not sure what to make of it. Has the right poisoned the term "liberal" to that extent?

I think so. I really do. That's why people go around calling themselves "progressives" these days. Because when some old white dude gets on Fox and sneers "those progressives" he has a harder time making it stick. It just sounds like he's railing against progress (which he is). But it's much easier to say "those dirty liberals want to take your money." That's a flavor that's probably never going out of style.

TofuTheAlmighty:And about half the 11% who label themselves Independent vote effectively as Dem or Rep partisans. Charlie Cook yesterday basically wrote off Independent as an informative label of voters.

To be fair, a good number of people who were "True independents" four or five years ago are "Technical Democratic partisans" now, thanks to the ratcheting batshiattery of the Republican party. The trend may reverse if they ever pull their heads out of their own asses.

/Part of that category.//Can't say I agree with the Democrats on every issue, but as it stands, I'd rather shave my eyeballs than vote Republican.

The interesting thing I draw from those numbers is that you have a move away from right-center. Center, and center-left grow but then so do true Republicans (marginally). So what the data really seem to show is that there is a purge/flight of moderate conservatives out of the party. People either have to fall in line and get with the program, or join the lib-commie-fascist-pinko pigs on the left.

abb3w:31% self-identify as Democrats, actually; the other 16% identify as democratic-leaning Independents.

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Though I do wonder whether or not Gallup has yet done anything to compensate for whatever was causing the R+7 lean in their pre-election polling versus the actual outcome.

I would bet large amounts of cash that Gallup has not fixed this. Go further.How many polls use this type of poll as the starting point for their expected percentage of voters in each bucket?How much does that skew drive the fact that the majority of the election polls were skewed GOP and explained the fun we had watching the GOP heads explode when the results were so far out of line with their "accurate" polls.

Lumpmoose:Hasn't that been true forever? A big chunk of Republican voters are "independents" that always vote Republican. It's similar to why few Americans deign to call themselves "liberal" even when many are.

Saiga410:Doesnt this kinda kill the deflection that Romney was in an echo chamber and just not infromed enough to know he had no chance? It looks like he did have good polling numbers.

If that's true, then he must have assumed that every single other voter outside the 47% would vote for him. That's a tad optimistic, to put it mildly. Anyone who can reliably count on 47% of the vote has only a short ways to go to 50% + 1.

AiryAnne:More Americans identified with the Democrats than with the GOP in 2012 47%-42%

Obama 51%Romney 47%Johnson 1%Stein .3%Other .4%

Well, dur.

eyupand of the remaining 11 percent, 10 percent were split evenly with 1% being wasted votes./yes we all know that votes for johnson were not wasted, IF ONLY more people voted 3rd party we would live in paradise

EighthDay:meat0918: Has the right poisoned the term "liberal" to that extent?

Yes, yes they have.

/liberal and proud of it

Actually, I feel that the right themselves have become so toxic, that if someone identifies themselves as "liberal", people will start to see that as "They're not the crazy right-wingers, so they're ok."

cbathrob:Saiga410: Doesnt this kinda kill the deflection that Romney was in an echo chamber and just not infromed enough to know he had no chance? It looks like he did have good polling numbers.

If that's true, then he must have assumed that every single other voter outside the 47% would vote for him. That's a tad optimistic, to put it mildly. Anyone who can reliably count on 47% of the vote has only a short ways to go to 50% + 1.

Citrate1007:Saiga410: Doesnt this kinda kill the deflection that Romney was in an echo chamber and just not infromed enough to know he had no chance? It looks like he did have good polling numbers.

#1 He honestly thought he was going to win#2 He shiat the bed in his comments alienating too many people

I think his history doomed him. When I first heard is name I though "Hmmm Republican governor who enacted health care reform and managed to win in Mass, I'll listen to him." Then you get into the whole veto override thing and the fact he wasn't bipartisan, so much as the Dem supermajority in the state government did shiat and Romney took credit for it (844 Romney vetoes, 707 of them overriden). That kind of kills the bipartisan appeal he has as a Republican who won in Mass.

After that his best hope was to run on the ground of "My stimulus programs will fix things faster than Obama's programs will." We'd had some sluggish growth and I'd be willing to hear Romney out on this. Instead he had a vulture capital record, a track record of sending jobs overseas, and he tended to deny Obama's programs worked in any form which is just a denial of reality.

/basically he had a bad record and he lied to us about it to make it look better, then was caught//his dad was an awesome governor in Michigan, too bad his son sucks